Author: kevin

One really exciting update is the detection and notification of key Microsoft product changes when a new patch is applied. I suspect this could be really helpful for keeping on top of new functionality added to your Azure SQL Databases.

As an example, below were the changes found when the latest SQL Server 2017 CU 6 patch was applied to a SQL Server 2017 CU 5 instance.

So you’ve been working on scripts in SSMS v17.x and suddenly it freezes and won’t let you interact with it at all.

No fear, when you close (kill) the SSMS process using Task Manager and reopen it you should be prompted to recover your files. The caveat being that you haven’t disabled Save AutoRecover in the Tools – Options menu item.

However, if you’d rather not take the risk of not being prompted and as per the previous screenshot, you should hopefully be able to find your scripts under your Documents\Visual Studio 2015 folder.

As the data is typically extracted and used on SQL Server, I would have thought it would be more meaningful for Microsoft to actually use the SQL Server types i.e. bigint, nvarchar(MAX), instead we are supplied with a you guess field and it just adds another unnecessary frustration for the DBA / developer.

As part of a revamp of AKAWN Monitoring to include Azure SQL Database and Linux support the usual look at available monitoring options is being under taken.

Azure SQL Database is one of the trickier to monitor as it is pretty locked down and xml parsing for session events info can be hellish (one of the reasons the current AKAWN Monitoring is moving away from use of xml storage).

As locked down as it is, there are still ways to look into the inner workings. Just one example of the security things I’ve discovered is: